Shame we didn't get a third Captain America movie

#the king of walking #HE WALKS SO WELL what’s that all about 

In the comics, Bucky’s brainwashing leaves him with enough agency that his past as the Winter Soldier is absolutely comparable to Natasha’s. Both were used and abused and manipulated, but they maintained enough control over their own actions that it is reasonable to question whether it mattered that they didn’t know who they truly were because they were still people.  In the MCU, they specifically wrote Bucky Barnes as a character whose agency was not just compromised but actually removed. It’s not just torture and coercion, though there are 70 years’ worth of explicit torture and coercion, it’s that for him to act as the Winter Soldier they have to cauterize out what makes him a person. In the MCU Hydra/the Soviets have not one but two ways to do it: the chair and the activation words. The Winter Soldier does not comply without them. This is not a question of a prisoner breaking after years of enslavement. This is explicitly shown as a mechanical way of erasing Bucky’s consciousness and capacity for consent. And it was a choice by the MCU to characterize his captivity like that, much like it was a (subtle) choice to make Bucky a man who was drafted rather than a man who enlisted.  And up to Phase 4 that had played out alright; the characters who see him as culpable are also shown to not be objective (Tony, for example, or Bucky himself). The audience knows better, though, because we are privy to all of the flashbacks and the medical torture and the him being bodily dragged out of cryo to be activated. But then the MCU actually had to confront its choices in TFATWS and they did it in the worse possible manner because they both chose to reinforce the narrative that Bucky was a powerless victim during his enslavement while making his recovery conditional on accepting responsibility for it. They pretend to sell Bucky along with the activation codes. There’s a whole pivotal scene by the firelight where Bucky finally does not respond to the activation codes and Ayo tells him he’s free and that’s because he was not free beforehand. In a storyline which places explicit moral value on refusing the serum, never once was it mentioned that Bucky did not consent to being injected with it in the first place. His situation obviously parallels Isaiah’s, not Steve’s.

But now the audience is being asked to see Bucky as someone who needs to make amends, not just because his therapist says so but because the moral compass of the series, Sam, makes it explicitly clear that what Bucky needs to do is “do the work”.  And this is INSANE. It’s insane. To have Bucky weep when the trigger words wash over him and still, still, try to have the audience buy into the narrative of his recovery as one where he needs to admit wrongdoing is absurd. It would be normal and expected of Bucky to feel wretched guilt over his past but the recovery is overcoming that, not reinforcing it. Bucky admits, word for word, that he had no choice and that would be bad enough, but the Winter Soldier was made to not even conceive of the possibility of choice. 

There can be no culpability without agency and guilt is not a measure of responsibility.

It’d be one thing if they’d made the Blip never take place, or restored everyone one millisecond after they disappeared — things they absolutely could have done, by the way — but they didn’t. They brought them all back five years later. It’s insane. It’s sociopathic.

First of all, a lot of people didn’t disappear that day. They died. People who got hit by suddenly driverless cars, people who went down on pilotless airplanes, people skydiving when the instructor disappeared, people whose doctors crumbled to dust mid-surgery, babies who wasted away in their cribs because their parents got Snapped. None of those people got restored in the Reverse Snap. They just stayed dead.

Second of all, everyone got brought back right where they’d disappeared. Which is fine in theory. Except isn’t it pretty lucky no one was sitting in that chair when Monica got restored? And also that apparently no one had moved that chair in five years? So what if you were on a plane that’s no longer in the air? What if you were on a boat that’s no longer in the middle of the ocean? What if you were skydiving and now there’s no parachute? What if you were on the top floor of a building that’s since been demolished? What if you were in your car in the middle of the freaking freeway? That’s thousands more deaths, conservatively.

But forget about all those dead people for a sec. TFatWS makes it explicit that the world is in complete chaos because of the Reverse Snap. People are displaced, families have been torn apart, people are angry and scared and no one knows what to do. It’s so clear that if the Avengers weren’t going to undo the Snap completely — if they weren’t going to undo it at the moment it happened — then they shouldn’t have undone it at all. That it would have been kinder, better to have let the Snapped stay Snapped. Not just for the sake of the people left, but for the people who disappeared.

Imagine the absolute hell of materializing five years in the future to find someone else living in your house, someone else married to your spouse. To find out your baby died or your mom or your partner. And by the way you have no credit, you have no money, no job history, no possessions, nothing. But good luck trying to rebuild your life and all! Aren’t you glad we brought you back? You’re welcome!

If the MCU ended with Endgame and no one ever had to think about the ramifications, then fine. Whatever. It’s a happy ending. What a cool final battle!

But it didn’t end there. And as such, it’s not a happy ending. It’s deranged. The Avengers are villains.

And it’s just so weird that no one in-universe seems to acknowledge this. That what the Avengers did was bad. That all this chaos, all this suffering, is entirely their fault.

“Yeah, things suck, but I sure do hope Captain America 1.0 is having fun on the moon! Man, we all miss Iron Man!”

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